faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of
everything that melts and fades and dies about us.

Over time, it has learned of its femaleness and knows now to think of itself as she and her. It still fits, familiar as the heaps of thick shag-fur that covers the skin-suit. She has once more been subject to the undue attention of something male that begat another uncomfortable period of belly-swelling and painful spasms that forced a thing like her from her own loins. But mother-master had been there to oversee and make sure the monster-pet took to its half of itself and nursed it.

She had. Somehow recognizing that this one was more half of her than the past two that had come before. She had not cast them off too much because of mother-master’s baleful looks but could not make sense of how not like her they hadn’t looked. Tusks, that was all the three of them had shared. Now though, that half of her had grown and gone and she was on her own again. Sometimes uncertain of just what that meant in her small basic brain.

Extinct blinked; slow and languid as if blinking came from a distant part of her brain, instinctive but delayed. Long turtle-blinks that took in the sight of the earthquake-animals like herself but not. She claimed no resemblance to them at all. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. But had laid her head against the earth to listen with an ear pressed to the dirt to hear how their steps raised tremors in the ground, like earthquakes. Extinct could pass hours like that. Just listening, so still as if she was dead - a heap of bones and fur ignored by the carrion birds.

The mammoth-mare did not know that the thing poking at her heart like a thorn was sadness. Or that it is because she is alone. The progenitor of her kind, and a grandmother at that but there are no mates to think she is other than ugliness personified. No one to look at her in a bonded manner of affection and desire. Not that she knew much of the matter despite the strange copulations she had seen and felt sick afterwards, as if she had drunk bad water - the kind that causes cramps, bowel release, and flatulence.

Extinct lingers; often her feet drag in the dirt and her snout snuffles just above it, stirring up small clouds of dust that elicit reactionary sneezes and snorts. Eventually she just stops or gives up, and stares. Staring is all that she knows how to do best besides eating the grass and getting fat.

Extinct

equus mammuthus